Stackshare Enterprise, Yonas Beshawred – StackShare

This is texturing TV. Hi everyone. Welcome to another text on TV interview.

I've got a new company to introduce your new company for our audience to introduce you to today. We're gonna do it through Jonas bashared if I got that wrong. I apologize.

Hey you own this welcome to Tech strong TV. Thanks so much on excited to be here and you got it right good. I try.

Anyways, let's hear it. You know, well, maybe a little bit about you and and then let's dive into your company. Sure.

Sure. Yeah. Well first I'm you know, I'm a huge fan.

com for quite some time. So been been in the space for a while and and know what you all do. So I'm excited to be here the company's called stack share I can start with a little bit of background about myself just super brief to to not worry about for the audience here.

But you know, I started my career right out of undergrad at Accenture and I did it strategy very briefly. So Gartner was kind of the way that companies would choose Technologies at that scale. These were fortune 500s that wanted to do things like build data centers.

So I did that for a very brief period and then I made my way out Silicon Valley and I joined the startup that had just gone through why commentator there were essentially building a square competitor and I got to see sort of like super early stage company building and I would See the founders of the company sort of going back and forth with other Founders in there by combinator batch saying, hey, we are free credits with Heroku Azure AWS. What should we too? What should we choose and you know, they would do these had these conversations over email.

So that's kind of what sparked the idea or stack share originally back in 2014. I just thought you know, there should be a website that actually helps you choose Technologies and that was kind of the the key Insight was you know, I was also learning how to code on the side and I thought it was kind of ridiculous that you know, there's websites to help you figure out how to program right? There's stack overflow when you have issues of coding, but before you get to that step, there's like no guide out there, right?

There's no Community around this and that's what really inspired me to create stack share was you know, there should be a place where you can go to discuss technology components and what other people are using, right? So that was sort of the Original driver for the idea and you know it's evolved now to to become a platform. But yeah, that's kind of the really short version of it.

Excellent Man and so when when did you actually start that share? Yeah, so I started to actually in 2014 as really just a community and Hacker News. Yeah.

Yeah, it was it was interesting because we didn't really have much of a website at the time. It was just the initial idea. But the initial idea just resonated so much with developers that that was enough to get things started and the next year.

We you know went through five-minute startups and and got our first round of fundraising or first round of venture capital. So, you know, it was it was really a developer driven sort of idea and that's been The Guiding principles. Like let's let's ultimately make something that developers love and if we just sort of keep that at the the core of you know, what we do then good things will happen.

That's excellent. What a great story man. And we should mention you know, you should mention it just say what's the URL?

io excellent, and now look 2014. com, right? And you know, it's not 2014 anymore.

It's 2022 and you know, the world's changed a bit certainly covid is Right a lot of changes. In your mind. What do you what do you see is the big changes that have affected the community and affected.

stock share itself You know, we so from a company perspective, you know, we crossed a million developers that are part of the community now last year. So that was sort of the big milestone and what we learned over the past couple years really over covid was that the community came to us and said hey stack share is awesome. Seeing what other developers are doing is great comparing Technologies.

Awesome. I can see what Ubers using I can see what all these companies are doing great, but I just want to understand what's going on inside my own company. So the these four folks that are working at massive companies and they say, can you give us a way to do this stuff privately because now the problem that companies face particularly at scale is that it just have a lot of text for all right, and that's the big problem that sort of surfaced as we started to build this community was that most companies today have thousands and thousands of code bases, right and PM had a stat that they put out.

The average modern web application is using over 2,000 modules, right? And so now you just have all this sprawl across thousands of code bases. And so that's the problem that the community came to us with and and actually while we're here today is because our community products has really evolved and now we've created an Enterprise offering that essentially allows companies to get real-time visibility into all the tech Stacks that they're using internally, right?

And so we you know, you plug in your VCS and then we map out all the Technologies you're using even down to the version level. And we keep it up to date for you in real time. And what we learned was that most companies do this through spreadsheets right now.

Literally, there's a Fortune 500 companies as part of the community that said, hey we have spreadsheets where we list out all the different devops Stacks that are being used across engineering teams. And so, you know traditionally this has been manual and we said look we can actually make that much better because we've already built all this data the profiles we have the community around all this so we can just use that to actually help you get visibility into all this text brawl that you have and sort of that's what we've seen has happened and I think in the startup world, we kind of take it for granted that we have standard tooling for how to deploy and build front-end apps. A lot of modern companies do companies that are Cloud native, but what we don't realize that vast majority of Fortune 500s have not even standardized on a VCS.

We very rarely talk to a company. Is all on GitHub or all on gitlab or bitbucket everyone sort of using three or four these different solutions. So I think the problem that we've seen really rear its head has become even more pronounced over the past couple years with teams being more distributed developers making more decisions on their own and just not coordinating across teams.

So that's the problem that we're now here to solve and I think what's really interesting is that we haven't seen too many companies try to solve this and it's an exciting space to be in because on the community side, you know, it's all about what's the world using right? What tech Stacks are being used by the world what technologies what new ones what which ones you're trending but then on the Enterprise side, it's like no it's all about. What is my own company using right and giving you insights into that and so both sides really play into the bigger sort of mission that we have which which has remained the same and our mission is really to make developers more productive by helping them learn about Technologies through the in companies, they Trust Right.

And so yeah. Interesting stuff. So I mean look this is a this is a big kind of step for you guys where I mean before, you know, it sounded like it was almost like the stack Overflow model where it's really the community of developers sharing notes if you will.

right on on what they're doing how they're doing it how this one does this how that one does that and that is That's like the very definition of developer Community. Right? I think developers love being in those peer-to-peer situations not necessarily a vendor telling them how to use something or how to use their tool.

So to be fair, you know vendors sometimes get a bad name. right because they try to sell too much but who knows their use cases better than the vendor does anyway, but anyway, you know, but we you're moving from that Community now to Call it a private label version of stackflow right where one organization can excuse me sex share right? Yeah, I said sex long.

I apologize always stack share where you know one Enterprise can use it just for their own stuff. It reminds me kind of one GitHub came out with GitHub Enterprise for instance right where you can exactly a private GitHub and what you're putting up. There's not available to the public and all that good stuff.

He is. Okay. Yep, so you The stack share Enterprises are hosted version.

Yep. io. But it's that's that's how we explain it to developers to it's very similar to GitHub public is free private you pay for and stack Overflow has a very similar model as well funny enough where really got the public Community.

But then if you want sort of the team version where you can privately have conversations about specific lines of code, they have an offering that allows you to do that. So very similar model and you know, it's it's pretty easy and under to understand in the developer Community, but I think it took us a while to actually figure out that that's what we should be building but the good news is that we finally got there and we actually a few weeks ago just announced that over a thousand companies are now using stack share Enterprise from startups like launch Darkly and Axle hire all the way. To public companies like Tyler Technologies.

So that was kind of the significant Milestone that I just yeah be proudly that's great that good stuff. so so I guess my question is do you consider yourself complimentary to like get up and and even stack overflow? or competitive or a little bit above Well on the the get-up side, you know, it's it's complementary like actually one of the case studies we just did was about how Tyler Technologies is moving over to GitHub and they're using stack share as the carrot and saying hey look if you put your repos inside of GitHub internally, then you get access to stack share.

So it's very complimentary. You know, the VCS is a core component of our solution. So GitHub bitbucket get lab and Azure devops we support all of them and it's very complementary because that's the data source for us to give you all these insights on the stack Overflow side most of the times when companies tells us that they're using stack Overflow for teams.

They're using Stacks here along with it because stack Overflow is great for code level discussions, right specific methods functions ways that you want to implement an actual actual logic. We sit a layer above that to say. Hey if you Want to know whether you should use react or angularjs, we'll just show you what every other developer inside your company's using for the different applications.

You have deployed. Right? So it's very complementary and we saw a different problem.

So companies are usually using us together. Actually that I didn't realize that it's pretty cool. Yeah, and we'll eventually have an integration so.

So what's next? Well next is just building a ton of you know, Enterprise features. We've got a pretty massive backlog.

But you know, the the bigger Vision here is to get to the point where it's you know, what we're calling Tech stack intelligence, right? That's sort of the name. We've given the platform you could think of it in terms of bi but if bi was sort of like in the engineering world, right one system of record that knows about all the different Technologies you're using inside the company on the engineering side of the house.

And so the bigger vision is to really be the system of record for engineering teams, right the one place that developers can go to understand what's being used inside and outside of their company, right? So, yeah. Yeah, so the you know, we're just building more Enterprise features and the you know, we've got we've got a bunch of things on the roadmap that large companies are asking for that.

We're excited to build. That is excellent, man. I love I love this yarn.

It's good stuff. you know you added as you mentioned since 2014, we're all you know, I'm an entrepreneur you're in entrepreneur during those what would you know there had to be times where you questioned you your You sanity and you're you know, what am I doing? What for people out here, you know because everyone thinks that oh, you did a startup and overnight you're you know, you're a big success a lot of startups.

There are some who, you know within a year or two are very successful, but I think More of right they they toil away and relative obscurity. You know building their startup one brick at a time if you will until it's it's something you know to be proud of what would advice would you give people out there who, you know want to do something? Yeah, you know I I always tell other Founders and folks that come to me for advice that the most critical component is that you're passionate about the problem space.

I think a lot of times we focus a little too much on the solution, but we don't think enough about how the problem you know, what what we want to do about this problem space and so for me, it's always been being really interested in this idea of like helping people. Choose Technologies is just interesting because no one has really solved it. You know, we're still it's 2022, you know decisions are still a mess when it comes to technology.

So for me, it's been about you know fall in love with the problem not the solution because you can pivot the solution. But if you stick with the problem space, you'll you'll just learn more and more over time and you'll get better at the solution piece of it. So that's kind of the big advice.

I would give folks. Make sure you're passionate about the problem. Yeah.

Appreciate it. Hey, you only say appreciate you coming on today too and telling us all about the company. Can you give me the URL one more time?

io. io. You know, it's thanks for coming on Manning and keeping up, you know enlightening us on the what's going on here.

I'm sure many people in our audience are already familiar. Come back on keep us posted on what's happening. Okay.

Absolutely will do. Thanks so much for the opportunity. Appreciate it.

io. I got all of it, right? Hey man, we're gonna take a break here on Tech's drug TV.

We'll be right back.